The present disclosure relates to a multilayer inductor and a method of manufacturing the same.
An inductor, one of important passive elements configuring an electrical circuit together with a resistor and a capacitor, may be used to remove noise or may be used as a component, or the like, configuring an LC resonant circuit.
Particularly, in accordance with improvement in performance of a product such as a smart phone, a Q factor of the inductor at high frequency is important.
Types of inductors may be divided into a winding type inductor, a thin film type inductor, a multilayer type inductor, and the like, depending on a structure thereof.
The winding type inductor or the thin film type inductor may be manufactured by winding or printing a coil around or on a ferrite core and forming electrodes at both ends thereof.
The multilayer inductor may be manufactured by printing conductor patterns on a plurality of sheets formed of a magnetic material, a dielectric material, or the like, and then stacking the plurality of sheets in a thickness direction.
Particularly, the multilayer inductor may be smaller and thinner than the winding type inductor and may also be advantageous for direct current (DC) resistance. Therefore, the multilayer inductor has been mainly used in a power supply circuit or the like that needs to be miniaturized and requires high current.
The multilayer inductor may be formed by printing conductor patterns on sheets formed of a magnetic material and then vertically stacking the sheets. In this case, parasitic capacitance and resistance as well as inductance are provided.
The parasitic capacitance or the resistance causes deterioration in inductance characteristics of the multilayer inductor. In order to improve quality of a product, it is necessary to minimize the parasitic capacitance and the resistance.
Meanwhile, a quality factor related to a relationship between inductance, parasitic capacitance and resistance of the multilayer inductor is called a Q factor.
Generally, when a Q factor of an inductor is improved, the number of layers of the multilayer inductor may be decreased or a degree of freedom of a design depending on space arrangement may be increased.
Therefore, in accordance with the recent trend toward an increase of an available frequency of an electronic product to a high frequency band and an increase in power consumption of the electronic product, research into a multilayer inductor having excellent Q factor has been actively conducted.